


Tempting Fate

by Sholio



Category: Daredevil (TV), Iron Fist (TV), The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: Case Fic, Dogs, Escape, Gen, Gunshot Wounds, Hurt/Comfort, Locked In
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-18
Updated: 2019-05-18
Packaged: 2020-02-29 11:25:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18777316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Danny helps Matt look for a missing Karen in rural New England. But the two of them are about to have their hands full just keeping themselves alive.





	Tempting Fate

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alchemise](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alchemise/gifts).



Winter in New England brings a damp cold, a biting cold that goes straight through coats and hats, stinging and burning. Danny's fingers stick to bare metal when he takes down the spigot and hose from an old-fashioned gas pump outside a gas station that looks like a throwback to the 1950s, tucked up against the side of a mountain. He hisses in pain and reaches into his pocket for his gloves. He's been in warm places lately, and even New York's city cold is a different thing altogether. He's almost forgotten the raw cold of the mountains, the way it gets down to your bones.

He redirects chi to warm his hands as he pumps gas. His Aston-Martin draws curious looks from some kids playing on a pile of snow by the edge of the postage-stamp-sized parking lot. "Hey kids," Danny says, with a friendly wave, and they giggle shyly and wave back. It makes him smile. Whether in Nepal or Malaysia or Vermont, kids are pretty much the same everywhere.

There's no card reader on the gas pump, nor is there a sign requiring prepayment. He goes inside to pay in cash, and while he's there, he buys a cup of coffee and another of tea, a handful of chocolate bars, and a Vermont map. He comes back out to find the kids clustered around the car, keeping a respectful distance but looking fascinated.

"Where'd you get that?" one of the kids asks.

"My dad gave it to me." It's close enough to the truth.

"Cool," says a gap-toothed girl with braids.

Danny hands around candy bars to the delighted kids, reserving two for himself and his passenger, and juggles the hot cups while opening the driver's door. Matt is, to all appearances, asleep in the passenger seat, but he stirs when Danny closes the door.

"Coffee?" Danny offers.

Matt takes the cup, reaching unerringly for it in that way he has that makes Danny forget a lot of the time that he's blind. Even if, in this case, it's the entire reason why Danny is here.

( _"I need your help,"_ Matt had said, back in New York, a day ago. Fidgeting a little, not looking at Danny: not Matt's usual way of not looking at people, but diffident and uncertain, almost. _"I need to go somewhere. And I, uh. I can't drive myself."_ )

Now Matt rubs at his temples as Danny unfolds the map, clears his throat and takes a sip of coffee. "Where are we?"

"Uh ... someplace called Leareyville, I think." Danny hunts through the colorful squiggles. "Fagan Corners is about another, uh, fifty miles or so, I think."

Matt tilts his head. "I didn't think anyone used actual paper maps anymore."

"I'm not great with the phone kind of maps." Danny smiles out of pure habit, the way he's gotten used to laughing off all the things he never did, all the things he doesn't know. "No Google Maps in the mystic city."

"Yeah, I get that," Matt says, and it makes Danny take a second look at him. 

He can count on the fingers of one hand the number of people who don't look at him the way people always look at him when he starts talking about dragons and chi and his childhood in K'un Lun, and he'd still have fingers left over. It's just Colleen, basically, and these days sometimes Ward, because Ward really _is_ trying and also there's that whole thing where he helped Danny steal magic guns and then they got chased by a dragon at one point, so Ward's actually had firsthand experience with it now.

But mostly Danny has learned to laugh it off as a joke. He loves his friends, he doesn't expect them to understand, but people who do understand are rare.

Matt is one of those people. And Danny has some idea of why, because Danny's met Stick.

When you were both raised to fight in a war and now the war is over, the enemy gone ... what do you do with yourself, after? Danny doesn't know very many other people who are having to deal with that.

"Yeah," Danny says. "I guess you do."

 

*

 

They're here because of Matt's friend Karen. Danny doesn't really know her, has met her only a few times. Colleen knows her better, speaks highly of her. From what Danny's seen, she's driven and fierce and he likes her.

And now she's missing.

"She comes from a town in Vermont," Matt had said while they drove north of the city, with music playing softly in the background on Danny's phone, and wet brown fields passing outside the car. "She was running down some rumors up there for a story she was working on. She was only going to be gone overnight." A brief silence, face turned to the window. "That was three days ago."

"I'm sure she's fine. Maybe she just decided to visit her folks for awhile."

"No," Matt had said. "Not Karen." And didn't elaborate.

 

*

 

They pull into Fagan Corners in early afternoon. There's patchy snow on the ground, a thin sun shining through bare-branched trees. On the way here, they drove through beautiful towns in the mountains, with restored gable-roofed inns and old mills straddling ice-clogged mountain rivers. But this town has a grimy, run-down look. 

"I'm going to make a phone call," Matt says. "Can we pull over?"

Danny obligingly pulls over in the wet slush beside a boarded-up drive-thru. Matt gets out of the car. Danny leans back and wonders if it's possible to get a halfway decent cup of tea here. He's not that particular about it, but he does have his limits; he can still faintly taste the bitter wet-cardboard flavor of the gas station tea. And he could use the caffeine after driving through the night.

Though he knows what his teachers would say about relying on artificial stimulants to stay awake. 

Sinking into himself, he focuses on purging himself of fatigue poisons and stirring up energy throughout his body. He opens his eyes, feeling a little more energetic, as Matt gets back in, looking pensive and slightly annoyed.

"How'd it go?"

Matt shrugs. After a minute he says, "There's a place I need you to help me find."

 

*

 

They find it easily, because it's not a big town and all they have to do is ask for directions. The diner looks as run-down as the rest of the town, and it doesn't look like business is beating down their door; there are just a couple of beat-up trucks in the parking lot. Danny parks next to them. He's starting to wish he'd driven something a little less flashy. He hadn't really thought about how much the car was going to stand out in the small towns and the mountains up here.

Matt gets out and snaps out his cane. He stands for a minute, not really looking around, but ... feeling things, Danny guesses. Smelling, listening. Danny's not sure what for.

"Want me to wait out here?" Danny asks. He's not entirely up on all of what's going on, in fact knows very little of it, but he can tell that Matt is tense and unhappy.

Matt hesitates, then shakes his head. 

Danny thinks about taking the chi-guns (currently wrapped up in a reusable shopping bag in the backseat) but decides not to; carrying around a pair of six-shooters tends to cause more problems than it solves, he's discovered. Unarmed, he follows Matt inside, out of the wan sunlight into a diner: really old-fashioned place, a counter with stools and a handful of plastic tables. They get unfriendly stares from the couple of locals at the counter, and a particular glare from the man behind it, directed at Matt.

"I told you not to come here."

"Sorry," Matt says, not sounding sorry. He finds a stool by touch. "I'll be out of your hair as soon as you tell me --"

"I don't know where she is. I haven't seen her in more than a decade. We're not close. There's no point in you coming here."

And that's when Danny realizes that this guy is related to Karen. Dad or uncle, he's not sure, but there's a certain resemblance -- not so much in the face as in the way they stand, the voice maybe.

Matt looks like there are a lot of things he wants to say, but all he says, in a very mild voice, "So she hasn't been here in the past few days?"

"No. I _told_ you that on the phone."

"I know," Matt says quietly. He pushes off the bar stool and stands for a moment with his head tilted to the side. "I had to come and see for myself."

Which would sound ridiculous to anyone who doesn't know him, but Danny can tell Matt is straining his senses to the utmost. Listening. Smelling. Looking for traces.

"She's not here."

"Yeah," Matt says, visibly coming back to himself. "I believe you. Thanks."

He turns toward the door. Danny hesitates and then goes with him. As they reach the door, the man behind the counter seems to snap out of a kind of paralysis. "Hey ... is she okay?"

"Do you care?" Matt asks in that same quiet voice.

"She's my daughter. Of course I care."

Hesitation, then: "Next time I see her, I'll tell her that. If she wants to get in touch with you, that's up to her."

And they're back out in the sharp sunshine.

"No Karen?" Danny asks softly. He's not going to ask about the subtext flying around through the conversation. Matt will talk about it if he wants to, or more likely he won't, because it's Karen's business.

"He's not lying. She hasn't been here. Not recently, anyway." Matt leans on the roof of the car, and a hint of frustration creeps into his voice. "And I have no damn clue where else to look."

 

*

 

There's a biker bar at the other end of town, newer-looking, with a couple of flickering neon beer logo signs, that also serves food. They order burgers for a late lunch, more like dinner now. Matt looks incredibly out of place in his suit and tie, rumpled as it is from an overnight drive in the car. Danny at least has the slight satisfaction of knowing that he fits in a little better in his hoodie and jeans.

"So now what?" Danny asks. "What was Karen up here for, anyway? Do you know?"

"She was investigating a drug ring," Matt says. "Drugs from the city, going up to the small towns, college towns, to the kids."

That sounds like the Karen that Colleen talks about. "To this town?"

"I don't know," Matt says, sounding frustrated. "This is the only place I could think to start looking. It's where she's from, and I think it's why she'd be chasing leads up here in the first place. Her brother died here." He's quiet for a minute, the conversation heavy with other unspoken things. "But beyond that, I don't know where she went, don't have a clue how to find her."

"You need Jessica, not me."

Matt smiles slightly. "I'll call her if we haven't turned anything up by tomorrow morning. The thing is, I wasn't quite prepared to call out the cavalry. I don't think she'd want me to. Not yet, not knowing what she's mixed up in. And Jessica is, er ..."

"Not subtle," Danny says.

"Not really."

"But useful, if your friend is in trouble."

"I know." Matt taps his fingers on the slightly sticky table and then, abruptly, pulls out his phone. "I'll see if Foggy's heard anything since we've been gone."

While they're waiting for their food, Matt calls Foggy, and then calls Karen's boss at the Bulletin. Danny stares out the window at the melting snow in the parking lot and feels like a third wheel. He doesn't mind being here, helping. He just wishes there was more he could do. He doesn't know any of these people. He doesn't know Karen. He doesn't know where to look. He's just kind of ... here. And he _hates_ this feeling, wanting to help but not knowing how.

He texts Colleen a picture of a scenic bridge that he took earlier, and texts Ward to let him know they're going to have to reschedule lunch tomorrow. Then he looks up Karen's blog on his phone. It's not like he expects to find a clue that everyone's overlooked, and he doesn't, but it's interesting reading and he's deep in the archives when the waitress shows up with their burgers, Matt's beer, and Danny's Coke about the time Matt hangs up.

"Anything?" Danny asks when the waitress has gone, reaching for the ketchup.

"Ellison is emailing me some of Karen's files." Matt rubs his temple again. He looks tired, but then, from what Danny's seen, Matt usually looks tired. There's a fading bruise at the corner of his mouth. Danny remembers that life: going out at night, every night; trying to live a normal life during the day; sleeping and eating when there's time. 

"I'm glad you came to me," Danny says, and sees something quick and odd pass over Matt's face. "For help with this, I mean. I, uh, I know I'm not Jessica. But I'm glad you felt like you could come to me."

There's a half-smile on Matt's bruised face. "Yeah," he says. "Me too." And that warms Danny in a way he can't quite explain.

There's a lot they haven't talked about since Danny's been back in town. A _lot_. He doesn't know if Matt is angry at him for leaving. He also isn't sure if he's angry at Matt for pretending to be dead for more than a year; what the _hell,_ Matt. He had to find out by way of Jessica that Matt was back in town. They haven't actually seen each other more than a couple of times since Midland Circle. It's not that he thinks Matt's avoiding him, exactly. It's not that he's avoiding Matt. It's just that they're both busy people, and, well, okay ... maybe there is some mutual avoiding going not. Not in an angry way, more of an awkward way.

He certainly hadn't expected Matt to just show up on his doorstep. And then their drive -- north from the city, through the evening and then through the night -- took place mostly in awkward silence, which didn't do much to convince Danny that there isn't something seriously broken between them. He just doesn't know what it is, or whose fault it is, or how to fix it.

In fact, the only actual conversation Danny remembers having after they set out from Manhattan, aside from brief exchanges about which way to go, was somewhere around midnight, on a dark highway north of the city, when Matt (who Danny had thought was asleep) sat up suddenly and said, "Is that Taylor Swift?"

"Uh, yeah?" Danny had his phone plugged into the car's stereo, but he'd been keeping the music low enough he could barely hear it, on the general principle that it'd be better for Matt that way.

"It's just a bit of a mood shift," Matt said, "since we were listening to Wu-Tang Clan and Killah Priest a minute ago."

"I contain multitudes."

Matt had grinned, leaned his head against the window, and to all appearances gone back to sleep (though the dark glasses made it hard to tell).

And that's the sum total of bonding that has occurred on this road trip so far. 

_Do I just ... ask? Maybe I should just ask._ It's not like he hasn't made a lifetime habit of opening his mouth and saying things that make other people look at him funny, after all. He's about to do just that when Matt raises his head suddenly. Danny looks too. There's someone pushing past the tables, coming their way. Big guy, beer gut, motorcycle leathers.

"So I hear you guys are asking questions around town," Beer Gut says, glaring down at them.

"That's us," Danny says, and just for the sake of being a brat, slurps through his straw while keeping his eyes fixed on the guy. 

"Here's your one and only warning," Beer Gut says flatly. "You go right back where you came from, and we won't have any trouble."

He turns and starts to leave. Danny looks at Matt. Matt stands up. So does Danny.

Danny's kinda always wanted to be in a bar brawl. It looks like fun on TV.

Beer Gut looks over his shoulder. "Really?" he says, sounding disgusted.

"Why don't we talk in the parking lot," Matt says, and Danny thinks, awwww. No bar brawl today. Parking lot fight instead. He's had those before.

They walk out to the parking lot, and as they leave the door, Beer Gut whirls around and aims a fist for Matt's stomach. Matt isn't there, of course, gliding to the side. Danny slides out of the way, spins around to drop Beer Gut with a kick, and looks around as he straightens up from that.

It's getting dark out here, early winter dusk bringing an extra chill to the world, and there are about a half-dozen guys out here, along with a couple of motorcycles and a dark van.

The van doesn't seem like a good sign. On the other hand, there are only a half dozen of them. Danny's taken on much worse odds than that. He grins at them and flexes his hands. Matt is standing still, silent and alert, ready.

"So are we going to talk about this?" Danny asks. "Or do we skip straight to the part where we kick you guys' asses and then we talk about it?"

And then one of the guys pulls out a gun and shoots Matt in the stomach.

It's so sudden that Danny is still opening his mouth to yell a warning when the crack of the gun rolls across the parking lot and echoes off the side of the bar. Matt was just starting to turn, aware of movement but unable to recognize what the threat was or where it was coming from. And then he's just standing there, raising a hand slowly to touch the place where blood is blooming across the white slash of his shirt between the dark bars of his jacket.

And Danny is straight-up frozen, can't move -- not for long, but for that first critical instant, when it's like Midland Circle all over again, one more time when he was too slow to help, too slow to stop the inevitable from happening in front of him. And then he feels the sudden movement of air that means there's someone behind him, and he's starting to turn just as something hard and heavy smashes into the side of his head. The world tilts sideways and telescopes to darkness around him.

 

*

 

The first thing he's aware of is a brutal, splitting headache. His eyes feel hot and swollen, and when he opens them there's nothing but darkness. He can't think; his head hurts too much.

Slowly he becomes aware of a faintly brighter square against the darkness. A window, high up. He's not gone blind like Matt; he's just in the dark. There is a musty smell, and something hard pressed against his cheek, and the sound of soft, quick breathing near him.

"Matt?" Danny whispers into the dark. "Matt!"

There's a sudden rustling sound from elsewhere in the dark, a hissed intake of breath, and Matt whispers back, "Danny. You okay?"

"Yeah, sure," Danny whispers. He hasn't tried to move yet. He's sort of scared to. His head is one hot, throbbing mass of pain.

Instead he tries squirming a little, and finds that he's lying on his side, with both his hand and feet bound. Just that little bit of movement makes his headache escalate so that sparks dance in his vision, and he lies very still and tries not to be sick.

Concussion, he thinks. But that's nothing compared to what happened to Matt. He can smell blood now that he thinks about it, that heavy coppery smell that you never quite forget. Some of it is probably his own. Some of it's not.

"Matt?" he whispers. "How bad are you hurt?"

There's a silence, and then, "Worse than I'd like. Not as bad as it could be."

Well, that's unhelpful. More sensory data starts trickling in, as Danny tries to get his brain up and working again. He's cold. Really cold. He can barely feel his hands and feet. "Where are we?"

"It's a basement," Matt whispers back. "Not really sure where. I ... wasn't conscious for all of it. I don't think we've gone too far." He hesitates. Danny starts to ask a question and then doesn't, because he's pretty sure Matt is doing his listening/feeling thing and Danny doesn't want to interrupt. 

"Rural," Matt says after a minute. "No traffic nearby. No farm animals either. There are a few other people in the house above us. I can hear heartbeats. Maybe five or six."

"Great," Danny mutters.

He doesn't want to, but he's going to have to sit up eventually. He makes an effort and okay, _no,_ that's bad. He slumps back down, breathing harshly.

"Danny?" Matt sounds worried.

"My head. Give me a minute." It's only a little darker with his eyes screwed shut, but somehow it feels like it helps a little. The world sways sickeningly around him.

He thinks about training in K'un Lun after being hit in the head, seeing double, sick to his stomach, but forcing himself onward. And then he gathers himself and sits up. 

Waves of dizziness, world spinning around him -- he tilts sideways and hits something with his shoulder, and it takes a little while for the world to calm down enough for him to figure out that he didn't just fall back down, he's leaning against something made of cold metal. Heavy equipment? Whatever it is, it's propping him up. He sits there and pants through his mouth for a minute, drenched in cold sweat. When he blinks, his eyelashes feel sticky. He's pretty sure there's blood on them.

"Danny?"

"Here," he manages through clenched teeth. He's not going to be sick, he tells himself, and after a minute he's more confident that he won't be. He twists his hands in their bonds.

"You know," Matt says quietly, "that thing you do with your fist, now might be a good time."

It's not just physical illness that makes it hard to say, "I can't do that anymore."

There's a silence, then a soft, "Ah."

"But I think I can get loose," Danny says, with more confidence than he feels.

He's starting to feel a little better, as long as he doesn't make any sudden moves. He squirms a bit, trying to grope with half-numb hands at the thing he's leaning against. He decides, after tracing some of its contours, that it's some kind of old iron stove. There ought to be _something_ on it that he can use to snag or saw on his bonds.

He takes a few minutes to center himself and redirect his chi. He may not be able to summon the Fist anymore, but he can get his hands warmed up and the blood flowing through them. That hurts a lot, a rash of pin-and-needle pinpricks that still doesn't hold a candle to the pain in his head. He might be able to do something about that, too, but he's afraid to try; he's still figuring out what he's capable of without the Fist, and head injuries are tricky. Warming himself is easy. Messing around with his head, in his current dazed state, might just make it bleed more or give himself an aneurysm.

But he can feel with his hands again, more or less, so he starts groping around on the stove for something he can work on his bonds with. He finds a rough edge of metal eventually, on the hinges of the door. It's an awkward angle, and every time he scrapes the rope, pain stabs through his head. The saw-edge rasping of rope on metal feels like it's grinding through his skull.

Matt clears his throat. "Danny? There's ... something else."

Danny hopes it's just his imagination that Matt's voice sounds weaker than it did earlier. He makes an acknowledging noise, concentrating on working on his bonds.

"Karen was here," Matt says, and Danny turns sharply that way. _Ow._ Head. Nope.

"Here?" he asks, when he can. "In this house, or ..."

"In this basement. I can smell her perfume. It's faint. A day or so ago, maybe."

Danny isn't sure what to say. They both know that the reasons why Karen might have been here, and the reasons she would have been taken away, don't go together into a shape that means anything good.

"She's not here now," Matt says. "At least, I don't think so. It's hard to tell from heartbeats, from this far away. I haven't heard her voice."

"She's probably getting the cavalry together to come rescue _us."_

A soft almost-laugh. "Yeah. Probably."

Silence then for a few minutes, broken only by the faint scraping as Danny works on the ropes. Then Matt says, "Sorry for getting you into this."

It takes a moment to sink in; Danny can really only focus on one thing at a time right now. Then he says, "I'm the one who -- I mean -- _I'm_ sorry, Matt. I froze, I fucked up, and I'm really sorry about that --"

"You what?" Matt says, and then, "Heads up. Footsteps coming. Two heartbeats."

Danny jerks around and, well, that's a mistake, so he's still coping with the room spinning drunkenly around him when the lights come on -- and then he has icepicks drilling into his skull by way of his eye sockets.

He's vaguely aware of movement, and then someone grabs him by a handful of shirt and hauls him up. The room spins again; all he can do is squint against it, trying not to dry-heave.

" _These_ two kicked Ray's ass?" a rough voice says disbelievingly, and Danny is dropped to the floor. The impact sends a galaxy of stars whirling through his vision. He's dimly aware of someone stepping over him like so much trash. Voices buzz in and out of his awareness as he fades in and out.

_I didn't train for fifteen years in K'un Lun to lie here and let them kill us._

He peels his eyes open, unsticking clotted-together eyelids. Breathes in, centers himself. The pain and dizziness recedes to the background of his awareness, still there, but something he can work around. He turns his head to the side.

They're in some kind of old-looking basement or cellar. Low ceiling, draped with dusty spider webs. The rusty cast-iron stove that he was working his bonds against, and a handful of old boxes and half-empty cleaning supplies and dirt-encrusted tools, are all that's down here.

This is his first opportunity to get a good look at Matt, and Matt looks _terrible._ He's chalk-white, the front of his shirt soaked with blood. Two big guys loom over him, one biker-type in a leather vest, and one skinny redneck type. 

Danny takes all this in with a sense of detachment. He's finally found it, that calm mental place they taught him in K'un Lun: apart from the world, able to bend his mind and body to his will. He's dimly aware of Matt being hauled to his feet by Leather Vest, aware that he is (for now) being ignored. He redirects his body's energy to his hands. It's not the Fist, but he feels his skin grow warmer, feels the muscles ready to respond ...

It's a matter of force applied in just the right way. He is a human weapon. Breaking things is what he was trained for. He twists his wrists and, with an almost anticlimactic pop, the weakened rope snaps.

No time to untie his feet. He sweeps his bound feet under the biker-guy's legs. Matt and Leather Vest topple together, and Matt does some kind of twist and throws his shoulder into Leather Vest's stomach.

Redneck spins around, drawing a knife, and Danny lunges for him, catapulting himself forward with his bound feet. The pain and dizziness is a distant distraction, nothing more. He's fought through worse; Matt is fighting through worse right now. Danny disarms him with a textbook-perfect strike to the wrist, follows it up with a chop to the neck, and as his target falls he --

\-- forgets his feet are tied and crashes to the floor.

He blacks out for a moment, comes back to himself dizzy and sick. As the dancing sparks clear from his vision, he sees Matt kneeling beside the unconscious-or-dead biker, hands still tied behind his back.

"Knife?" Matt says, and then, sharply, "Danny!"

"Here." Danny's voice comes out in a hoarse rasp. He finds the knife under the metal legs of the stove, and decides not to ask how Matt knew there _was_ a knife; the answer is probably something like "the smell" or "the sound of the light glinting on the blade." Danny slashes the bonds around his feet and scoots over to Matt on his butt, not quite ready to try standing up again yet. The room pulses in time with the throbbing of his skull.

"Thanks," Matt says faintly when Danny cuts off his bonds. Matt looks even worse up close. He's lost his sunglasses, leaving his eyes strangely naked-looking, and even his lips are bloodless. "Do you have your phone?"

Danny starts to shake his head, realizes just in time that it would be a terrible idea. "No."

"Me neither. Check their pockets -- phones, keys, anything?"

Danny's glad one of them is thinking. It takes longer than it should to fumble through their pockets, stopping occasionally to breathe through the nausea. He finds wallets on both, keys on one, phones on neither. They don't have guns either, which is a little bit surprising, and also annoying, because stealing a gun would really have come in handy about now. 

He wonders absently where the chi-guns are. If he's lost them, Orson Randall is going to be pissed. Even more pissed than he already was at having his guns stolen, that is.

"We gotta go," Matt says softly. Danny looks up to find that Matt has made it all the way over to the door, leaving a trail of blood. "I think we got lucky and nobody heard that, but they're gonna be down in a minute to find out where their buddies got off to." He stopped to take a couple of breaths. "What I'm thinking, you go ahead, look for a phone --"

"Together," Danny interrupts flatly. He gets to his feet by climbing up the stove's cold iron side, but finds he's pretty stable once he gets there, as long as he doesn't make any too-sudden moves.

"You can go faster on your own."

"You might be surprised." Danny raises a hand to touch his hair, finds it sticky with half-dried blood.

Matt doesn't say anything, and then he wordlessly holds out a hand. Danny helps him up and slings Matt's arm over his shoulder. Matt knots a hand in the back of Danny's hoodie and leans on his shoulder, breathing heavily, his other hand pressed to his stomach.

On the other side of the door out of the basement, there's a steep flight of wooden steps going up. Danny plants his foot on the bottom one, wonders if Matt can do it, wonders if _he_ can do it -- and then decides it doesn't matter. They just have to. That's all.

"You didn't fuck up." Matt's voice is quiet, a ghost of sound near his ear. 

"I could have stopped them," Danny murmurs back. "Before they shot you. If I'd been fast enough. I just ..." And he stops himself. He doesn't want to think about that moment, seeing Matt go down, when it all just ... crashed on his head.

"Oh, _that?"_ Matt pats his shoulder clumsily. "You want the list of times I've fucked up a lot worse than that? Because it's a long one."

Danny laughs a little, and then it takes all the concentration he has to keep both of them going up the stairs. There's a closed wooden door at the top. Matt listens for a moment, then nods. Danny opens it and peers out into a small hallway. Open doorway at their right, and straight ahead, what looks like the door to the outside.

"At least four in the house," Matt whispers. "Might be more like six or seven." 

"Do you want to look for Karen?"

"I don't think she's here." Matt pauses for a breath. "Could look for a phone in here, but ..."

Danny nods, for what that's worth. The more time they spend in the house, the greater the chance of getting caught, and neither of them are worth much in a fight right now.

So instead he heads for the door, trying not to get their legs tangled up together. He stops at the door, waits for Matt's nod, and opens it.

It's dark outside, the yard of wherever they are lit with bright floodlights. There are big trucks around, a few motorcycles too, and a couple of long wooden sheds that look like they might be old barns. Down at the edge of the yard, a handful of guys are loading something in crates into an idling truck. Danny starts to ask if Matt can tell if those are drugs, and then doesn't, first of all because he already knows the answer, and second because it doesn't really matter; whatever's going on here, it's clearly illegal and these guys are willing to shoot a guy in the middle of town for asking questions in the wrong places.

There's more snow here than in town, quite a lot of it. The air is sharp and cold, like having a knife scraped over his skin. Danny wishes he'd thought to stop and try to find some coats. Matt's right, though -- they're in no condition to search the house, not with this many people around.

Instead they awkwardly try to dash (it's really more like hobbling) to the shelter of the nearest truck. In the inky pool of shadow on the woods side, Danny tests the door, finds it unlocked, and opens it as quietly as possible. The cab light goes on like a beacon. Danny curses, scrambles up onto the seat, shuts it off, and then leans on the back of the seat until the throbbing in his head recedes to bearable levels.

There are no keys in the ignition, and the keys he took off the guys in the house don't fit. 

"You know how to hotwire a car?" he whispers down to Matt.

"Sorry. No."

Danny starts to climb back down, when there's a sudden commotion from the house.

"Shit," Matt mutters. "I think they just checked the basement."

They crouch in the shadow of the truck while lights go on in the house and there's yelling back and forth across the yard. Danny stares wistfully at the other truck idling in the shadows of the shed, but it's just too far. There's no way they could make it without being spotted.

"Woods?" he whispers.

"Guess we don't have a choice." Matt's voice is heavy, and Danny tries not to think about trying to make a run for it in the night and the dark and the cold. There's no telling how far from a town they are, or how long Matt can walk before his strength gives out.

There's one thing he might be able to do to help. "Wait a minute," Danny whispers, and climbs back up into the truck. Come on, there must be a coat or an emergency blanket or _something_ in here. Finally his hand settles on something fabric behind the seat, and he pulls out a scruffy canvas work coat.

He slithers down carefully to the snow and wraps it around Matt, who shakes his head and tries to push it back at Danny. "You need it more than I do."

This is patently untrue, because Matt is already shivering, and anyway -- "I can use chi to keep myself warm. C'mon."

"Do I want to ask how that works?" Matt whispers, as Danny slings Matt's arm over his shoulder again, waits out a head rush, and then starts away from the truck, into the edge of the dark woods.

"I don't think I could explain it."

"That's what I thought."

 

*

 

Away from the well-lit house, in the darkness under the trees, the snow turns out to have a strange luminescence that Danny remembers from snowy nights in the mountains around K'un Lun. Between that, the starlight, and a sliver of moon, they can see well enough not to tumble down any hills or break an ankle.

But that's the only luck they're getting tonight.

The snow ranges from ankle-deep to almost up to their knees in shady hollows. Brush and brambles snag at their legs, slowing them down to avoid tripping. There's a dirt road leading away from the house, and Danny tries to stay near it, afraid that if he gets too far from it they'll get lost. But he keeps stumbling into the ditch along the road (hurting himself, hurting Matt) and worse, he keeps coming out onto the road itself, only to duck back into the trees. Several times, he and Matt have had to crouch behind bushes or hedges or whatever's handy as cars and motorcycles roar along the road, headlights strobing through the trees.

Danny has a feeling that if they get caught this time, they're not just going to be tied up and thrown in a basement for later interrogation.

He really, really wishes he still had Orson's guns.

As if reading his mind, Matt murmurs after one of these interludes, "Hey, if you don't mind a personal question ... is using the, er, Fist something you can get _back_ , or --"

"I'm not worthy of it."

"Oh," Matt says. He sounds startled. There's silence for a little while, as they stumble through the snow on wet, half-frozen feet. "Sorry. I didn't mean to -- you know. None of my business."

"Not your fault." Danny has to concentrate on walking for a minute. His head throbs in time to his steps. He's cold, he feels like hell, he just wants to lie down; frustration wells up in him, mostly directed at himself. "I wasn't good at it. I never did any of it right. I _tried_ , Matt, I really did try to do what you asked, but I had to leave -- at least that's what I told myself --"

"Whoa, hey, how did we get to ..." Matt breaks off with a gasp as Danny's foot goes into a hole and he stumbles, nearly dragging them both down. The pain in Danny's head spikes, and they both stand there for a minute, hanging onto each other, breathing through their own separate worlds of pain.

Then Matt says quietly, his hand fisted in Danny's hoodie, "What I asked of you wasn't fair."

"I tried, though. I'm sorry that I left."

There's a rueful warmth in Matt's voice. "I left, too."

"True," Danny has to admit.

"Look," Matt says after a minute, when they're moving again. "This is an on-the-job learning experience." The words come out in fragments, between harsh gasps for breath; the walk is wearing him down even faster than Danny had feared. "None of us have this figured out. If you think I do, it's only because I'm good at faking it. I dress up in red spandex and go out and fight crime at night, I mean, that's not the sign of a healthy work-life balance ..." He stumbles again; the breath goes out of him. "... _shit_ ..."

"Do you need to stop?"

"No," Matt whispers, but that one word is all he can manage, gasping for breath.

Danny stops anyway, and eases them both down at the base of a tree. When he looks back, carefully turning his throbbing head, he sees dark splotches in the snow. Matt's bleeding again. They both are, he finds, tentatively touching his throbbing temple and bringing his hand away wet and sticky.

It's far too cold to sit here in the snow for very long, but they're both too exhausted to get up. Danny reaches down into his dwindling chi reserves and tries to warm himself, though all he manages to do is make himself shiver harder, snapping his teeth together and escalating his headache into new realms of pain. He's been trying to bleed off energy to Matt if he can, though he's no longer sure if that works, not like it did when he had the Fist still.

"Danny," Matt says quietly. "You know you need to go for help."

"No." He scrapes up a little more heat, manages to stop his shivering, tries to let some of it seep into Matt as well as he can.

"You can move a lot faster without me."

"You'll die if I leave you here in the snow, so no."

"Danny ...!" It comes out on a huff of frustration, somewhere between a laugh and a sob. "I'll be fine. Just let me follow at my own speed. You can get to wherever this road goes, call for help."

It's seductively tempting, that plan. And wrong. Danny left once, at Midland Circle. He's not doing it again. "No," he says simply.

Matt starts to say something, then falls silent. Listening. 

"What's --"

"Shhh." Matt tilts his head. "Damn it. _Damn_ it. They've got dogs. Not that they need them to find us in this snow."

Danny looks back. He can see nothing in the dark woods. Hear nothing. "You sure?"

"Of course I'm sure." He sinks his fingers into Danny's shoulder. "We gotta go."

Danny hauls him up. They're completely screwed in the woods; they can't possibly move fast enough to get away, so he stumbles out onto the road. Matt can give them enough warning to hide if they have to ... he hopes.

Not that they can make much better time here, either. But there's got to be _something_ they can get to. A house. A hunter's cabin. Anything.

The first time Matt falls, he makes no sound. Danny's head explodes in pain. They both sprawl in mud and snow for a few long moments before Danny hauls them back up again.

The second time they fall, Matt makes a small, pained sound. Danny can hear the dogs now.

"Danny." Matt's fingers are deceptively strong on his shoulder, and they're trembling now, like the rest of him. Danny doesn't have the strength anymore to keep either of them warm. Or maybe he was just fooling himself the whole time. "You gotta go, Danny. They're almost here."

"No," Danny grits out, pulling himself to his hands and knees.

"All you're going to do is die here. Go!"

"No!" Danny snarls. "I stood there and watched you die once. I won't do it again!"

Matt's face is a blank blur in the starlight. He opens his mouth. Closes it.

And then the dogs burst out of the woods. There are two of them. They're the kind of fierce-looking breeds that Danny would have expected, and he might laugh if the situation wasn't so dire. One is a Rottweiler, one is some kind of German shepherd mix.

Matt fumbles through the mud and snow, reaching for some kind of weapon. His hand closes on a rock.

"No," Danny murmurs, dropping a hand to touch Matt's. "Trust me."

He picks himself up to his knees with an effort and simply looks at the snarling dogs. He did this with Joy's dog, once upon a time. All dogs are nice dogs, deep down; he believes that. They don't want to hate and attack. If they've been twisted by cruelty, they will expect fear; it feeds into their deeper predatory instincts, the same way it does with some people. But they don't know what to do with calm.

"Hey there," Danny says gently, reaching out.

He doesn't know why, or even remember how he figured it out, but animals are highly susceptible to a calm aura. Most animals. All except donkeys. Donkeys are devil-beasts and he always let Davos deal with them.

But Danny really likes dogs, and most dogs seem to respond to it. He lowers his hands slowly, and the dogs lie down, one and then the other. One fluffy tail and one truncated snub-tail swish in the slushy road.

"Good dogs," Danny murmurs, creeping toward them until he can reach out to scratch first one fuzzy skull, then the other. Tails swish faster; tongues creep out of sharp-toothed jaws; and two attack dogs slobber on him happily. He murmurs to them in Mandarin, the language in which he first learned to talk to dogs, as he runs his fingers lightly across the scars of old hurts, corded under the fur. These dogs were not gently trained. Given kindness instead of beatings, they are all but crawling into his lap.

"I'm glad you're having a moment," Matt says behind him, sounding almost like his old self, "but do you think we can get out of here?"

"Yeah, of course." Danny starts to turn, and that's when the motorcycles skid around the corner, throwing up slush and muddy water.

Matt moves faster than Danny would have thought he was still capable of, rolling into the ditch. Danny scrambles into the woods on the other side of the road. The dogs go with him, whether he wants them to or not.

There's a sharp pop of gunfire. Danny throws himself painfully into the snow. Furry bodies press down on either side of him; there are whines of distress.

"Hey!" a rough voice yells into the trees. "We got your buddy! You want to see his brains blown out?"

Danny pulls himself up to his knees and peers through the trees. Matt's filthy, covered in mud, pushed down to his knees. One of the guys has a gun pressed to Matt's skull.

There is no part of him that's going to run now.

He uses the rough trunk of a tree to get to his feet. "Stay," he tells the dogs quietly, and then he limps out of the edge of the woods.

"Danny," Matt murmurs, "damn it."

"It's okay," Danny says, hands in the air. There are four guys, with their motorcycles grumbling and headlights illuminating Matt on his knees, the guys around him. And he can hear more engines on the way. "It's okay. Nobody needs to get hurt."

Maybe humans can be calmed like attack dogs. These guys were kids once, too. They weren't always what they are now.

"Empty your pockets," snaps one of them. 

As he speaks, a pickup truck skids around the corner and slides to a halt, throwing up a cascade of mud and water. Great, Danny thinks as the truck's high beams light them all up in a brilliant tableau: reinforcements. Except Matt doesn't look scared; Matt doesn't even look worried. Matt is staring straight ahead: thinking, it looks like. Listening.

Then Matt turns his head to look at the truck that just arrived, and he starts to drop to the ground.

Just as the truck's driver jumps out of the driver's side and opens up with a semiautomatic weapon.

The gun that was pointed at Matt's head a second ago goes off, maybe by intent, maybe by accident, as the guy holding it goes down in a spray of blood. The others never even manage to react. Danny is too caught off guard to throw himself down, but not a single one of the bullets hits him; it might _look_ like an indiscriminate spray of gunfire, but it's actually very carefully aimed.

And then Danny is left standing and staring at four bodies, with Matt on the ground and the driver of the truck lowering his gun like it's an extension of his arm.

"Ah," Matt says from the mud of the road, sounding resigned. "It's you."

Danny can only stare in complete shock. The truck's driver is nondescript, wearing a dark jacket with short-cropped hair. Military, maybe; it's hard to tell. He nudges one of the bodies with his foot, and doesn't seem to be paying any attention at all to Danny. Danny honestly can't figure out if he's more of a threat than the drug dealers, until a woman with her hair pulled back in a blond braid jumps down from the passenger side of the truck.

"Matt!" she cries.

"Karen," Matt murmurs, and then Karen is pulling him up and trying to get him on his feet, while Danny first stares at her, and then turns dazedly as Gun Dude nudges him in the arm. 

"Hey," Gun Dude says. "You okay?"

"I, uh ..." Danny begins. The dogs come out of the woods just then, creeping over to press themselves to Danny's legs.

"Really?" Gun Dude says. He has an angular face, sharp and scary until he smiles -- which he does, a quick flash of warmth, aimed mostly at the dogs.

"Frank," Karen says sharply. Matt is draped on her shoulder. She's wearing a plaid shirt, too big for her, with her braid falling down her back. "I don't think there's room in the truck for all of us. I can --"

"Take the truck, is what you can do." Frank pulls out a set of keys and tosses them to her. Karen snatches them out of the air.

"What are you going to do?" she asks, while Danny stares at her and tries to come to terms with the fact that she's totally fine and is, in fact, rescuing _them._ Maybe all of this would be easier to take in if he didn't have a head injury.

"Got a couple of perfectly good bikes here," Gun Dude says. "And what I hear is there's a warehouse full of drugs up there."

Danny takes a deep breath. "Hey, if you're going up there, if you see a couple of old-fashioned revolvers in leather holsters, could you hang onto them? They're kind of important."

Gun Dude gives him a light salute, a tap of fingertips to forehead, and goes to one of the motorcycles. He throws the rifle over his shoulder and his leg over the seat.

"Be careful!" Karen shouts after him.

And then he turns the bike around and peels off in a spray of mud. The dogs whine and lean against Danny's leg.

"You're Danny Rand, right?" Karen says.

Danny turns to give her a smile, staggers, and almost falls over. He stabilizes himself on the dogs and gets a hazy, double-vision glimpse of Karen grimacing.

"I was going to ask if you can drive, but I guess the answer is no." She gestures to the truck with her chin, having her arms full of Matt. "Can you get in and help me get him up?"

Danny makes his wobbly legs carry him to the truck, and his wobbly arms pull him inside. Karen hands up a dazed, semi-conscious Matt, and gets into the driver's seat. Danny beckons the dogs, and suddenly the cab is very full of wet, muddy dog.

"Wait a minute," Danny says, as his brain finally starts working again. "Was that the _Punisher?"_

"No," Karen says quickly, throwing the truck into gear. "Just a friend. Matt, you look terrible."

"That was the Punisher. Why didn't you tell me you know the Punisher?" As lousy as he feels, as worried as he is about Matt, Danny still can't help thinking: _Wait 'til I tell Colleen about this._

 

*

 

Once they get to a place where Karen has cell reception, she calls for help, and Danny and Matt are airlifted to a hospital in Albany. (The dogs stay with Karen in the truck. Danny wants to ask what'll happen to them, but first of all _Matt_ , and second _ow my head_ with a side of _riding in helicopter yay!_ ) Danny ends up getting a CAT scan and a few other tests while Matt goes into surgery, and by the time he's out of that, Colleen and Ward show up with clean clothes and a ride home. (At which point he finds out that being in a car for several hours with a concussion really sucks a lot, and being on a road trip with Colleen and Ward in the _same_ car is really no picnic either. He lays down in the backseat and drowses off about the time they're arguing over which gas station to stop at.)

Colleen is much less impressed about the whole Punisher thing than Danny hoped, because it turns out she has not only met the Punisher, but actually worked with him one time while Danny was in Asia, and _why doesn't she tell him these things, that's so cool!_

... though his reaction would be even more enthusiastic if he didn't still feel like total crap. 

It turns out that having a concussion is good for a lot of sympathy, though it would be easier to appreciate the attention if he felt better. Mostly he spends a few days hanging out around the dojo, sleeping a lot and having people show up to hang out with him (also nice). These people include Karen, who shows up one day bringing his guns, wrapped in a piece of canvas that is definitely not what they were wrapped in the last time he saw them. She says she's not sure what happened to his car. The guns look fine, though, and she spends the entire afternoon hanging out with him watching Pixar movies, and he decides Karen is a cool person who can hang out in the dojo anytime. She says Matt's doing better and is back home. The dogs are fine too, she says. She refuses to answer any Punisher-related questions.

"We went to see your dad," Danny says, feeling guilty.

"I know," Karen says, eyes fixed on the laptop screen on the coffee table.

"He said he worries about you, and if you want to call --"

"Matt told me." The tone of her voice is very final. Danny turns up the volume on the TV to fill the silence.

And that's that.

From Matt, there is no word. And Danny tells himself that he's just giving Matt space, he doesn't want to be underfoot, and if Matt wants to hang out, or to chat, Matt would have called. But then he thinks ... well ... this is _Matt Murdock,_ after all. And that's why, a week or so later, when he's finally stopped having constant headaches and can see straight again, he picks up a pizza and drops by Matt's place.

His knock on the door is greeted by barking. Matt calls something along the lines of "Come in!" (obscured by barking) and Danny carefully opens the door and edges inside before he's overwhelmed by two large, happy dogs.

"I'm only keeping them for now. Karen's finding them homes," Matt says from the couch.

"Right, cool, gotcha. I brought pizza. Do dogs like pizza?"

According to Matt, pizza is not good for dogs, but there's both dog food (of the gourmet canned variety) and dog treats, so Danny feeds the dogs and makes two friends for life. Then he sits down on the couch and holds out the pizza box. "Pizza at twelve o'clock," he says, in case Matt couldn't tell where it was.

Matt grins a little, and takes a slice. He's moving carefully, wearing loose sweats, with occasional flashes of bandages visible when he turns and the sweats gap around his middle.

"How you doing?" Danny asks.

"Oh, fine," Matt says, which is always going to be the answer from Matt. "Guess there was a big fire in rural Vermont a few days ago."

"Is that right?"

"Burned a meth lab and a couple warehouses of cocaine."

"... so you know the Punisher, huh."

Matt laughs softly. "Okay, look, that's complicated."

"You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to." Danny tries not to look too hopeful. "But, you know, if you want to ..."

"I'll keep that in mind," Matt says, in a definitive sort of _not talking about it anytime soon_ kind of way. "Pizza's good, though." And he gives Danny a quick grin.

The dogs, having finished eating, come over and lay on them, one spread out across their laps, one on their feet.

"So you're finding homes for these," Danny says, playing with the Rottweiler's ears.

"Soon," Matt says firmly. "I can't walk dogs this size in New York. Foggy's been helping."

"I can help too."

"That'd be appreciated, thanks."

Danny is totally not working out a Defenders dog-walking schedule in his head. He is _not._

(But seriously, Jessica could really use a dog.)

**Author's Note:**

> There is now a sequel, [The Finer Points of Dog Ownership](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19342393), in which Danny goes ahead and follows up on the idea of giving Jessica a dog. (No JJ3 spoilers.)


End file.
